Hit network shows aren't supposed to be weird or complicated. But for J.J. Abrams, the creator of Alias and Lost, the brainy popcorn is paying off

There needed to??be??a??monster. That, in a nutshell, was what J.J. Abrams and his co-creator, Damon Lindelof, decided soon after Lloyd Braun, then ABC's entertainment chairman, gave them this assignment: Write a show about plane-crash castaways on a desert island. The parallel to a certain CBS series was obvious. If Survivor was Gilligan's Island with real people, Lost would be Survivor with fake people. But Abrams, who had raised the spy serial to new heights of cliff-hanging absurdity with Alias, knew that the series would need something extra, something weird, to sustain the audience's interest and his own.